Planning ahead is something astronomy and space exploration excels at. Decadal surveys and years of engineering effort for missions give the field a much longer time horizon than many others. In the near future, scientists know there will be plenty of opportunities to search for biosignatures everywhere from nearby ocean worlds (i.e. Titan) to far away potentially habitable exoplanets. But it’s not clear what those biosignatures would look like. After all, currently there is only Earth’s biosphere to study, and it would be unfortunate to miss hints of another just because it didn’t look like those found on Earth. Now a team led by researchers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) have come up with a framework that could help scientists look for biosignatures that might be completely different from those found on Earth.